Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Sighting at the Missouri Botanical Garden

As I mentioned yesterday, the little lady and I took a road trip to St. Louis this weekend. Whenever we hit the road, we party like we mean it. We hit thrift stores and antique malls. We find the illest museums. We invariably locate the top botanical gardens in the region and make sure they never forget the day we came to town. Thanks to her, the pictures actually made it to Flickr.

The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis is a good one, dominated by a 7-story geodesic dome called the Climatron. Inside the Climatron is a simulated rain forest. It looks like this:

The Climatron is populated by a gregarious group of Silver-Beaked Tanagers, imports from South America. They look like this:

There's also an orchid exhibit going on right now, and apparently the MBG knows how to keep the children entertained while their parents soberly appreciate the flowers: a dinosaur scavenger hunt. Well, one dinosaur may not make much of a scavenger hunt, but it's something. Luckily, Jennie and I found the little sauropod, tucked away in the greenery.

I suspect that the little sauropod is also a clever way to remind visitors that beginning on May 1, the Climatron will host the traveling exhibit DinoQuest. The Climatron will be stocked with reproductions of dinosaurs, which will be accompanied by further exhibits, including an egg incubator prop from JPIII. More info at the link above; images here or at their Flickr stream. Here's a Bambiraptor model, photographed during the exhibit's time at the Denver Botanical Gardens.